The Y Combinator: developing intuition around abstract recursion - Dave Kimber | Lambda Days 2024

[CodeSync]

The Y Combinator: developing intuition around abstract recursion - Dave Kimber | Lambda Days 2024

The Y Combinator: developing intuition around abstract recursion - Dave Kimber | Lambda Days 2024

This talk was recorded at Lambda Days in June 2024. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://lambdadays.org

Abstract
The Y Combinator is an elegant construct of the Lambda Calculus used to implement recursion.

Unfortunately, it’s so elegant, so abstract, and so succinctly expressed that it’s quite difficult to understand how it works.

In this talk, I will be guiding you through developing an intuition for its inner workings, looking at its practical applications, and hopefully shedding some light on why it is so beautiful.

Working in Clojure and using some snazzy animations we will be looking into how the Y Combinator is evaluated into a dynamically generating infinite stack of function calls and how these then resolve into solutions to recursive problems.

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